What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [25]
When I ran newspaper sites, I tried to provide organization for communities with forum discussions and web-page tools, but I made the mistake of acting like a portal or media gateway: I decided what those communities were—parents, residents of a county, cooks. I thought I knew. If instead I had provided an open platform, who knows how many witches would have gathered in New Jersey? The key to offering elegant organization to individuals or groups—the key to all platforms—is to enable others to use the tool as they wish. They know their needs. Such openness and flexibility also enables more groups to form. Each one may be small, but altogether, they add up to a larger network of groups—a mass of niches.
There is an ongoing debate about who will win the social space, what company will own the social web. That’s a wrong-headed view of the opportunity. The internet already is a social network. So is life. The internet merely provides more means to make more connections. The winner is not the company that gets us to come in and be social inside a wall: the social AOL or MySpace or, for that matter, Facebook. The winner will be the one that figures out how to bring elegant organization to the disorganized social network that the internet already is. We are waiting for the Google of people. Zuckerberg’s stated ambition is to be that next Google. And Google is afraid that he might succeed, which is why it created a standard called Open Social and banded together with other social networks, hoping to beat Facebook at its own game. To win, Facebook needs to be more open, to look beyond its walls and figure out how to take its organization to the rest of our lives online. I’ll bet they will be smart enough to do it.
Politics is at last learning the skills of self-organization. In 2004, Howard Dean’s presidential campaign used blogs and discussion as well as in-person Meetups to organize volunteers and raise money. Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign made brilliant use of social tools, including Facebook and the iPhone, to organize rallies and rake in donations. More profound, it used the social web to organize a movement. It also took advantage of the fact that other communities—such as that inside the DailyKos blog—had gathered around Obama. It didn’t hurt that one of Facebook’s founders, Chris Hughes, was an adviser to Obama’s campaign.
We want to be connected. In the internet age, we have gained a reputation for being antisocial, for sitting on our couches, laptops on laps, earphones on ears, never talking to anyone. But in truth, we’re talking to more people from more places more often than ever before because we have more ways to do it. Thanks to Google and Facebook, I’ve reconnected with old colleagues and friends and made new business connections. The success of Facebook comes in great measure from returning us to real identities, real reputations, and real relationships. Anonymity had its place on the internet—it was fun for awhile, when, as the legendary New Yorker cartoon says, nobody knew you were a dog. But now we’re settling back to our norm: hanging out with people we know, like, and trust. We often want to do more than hang out together: We want to accomplish things together.
Organization is a business model. Look at the communities around you—not communities you start but communities you serve. There is one, even if you are an airline or a cable company or a doctor’s office. There is a community of people with like interests and needs. Have you enabled them to talk, to share what they know and need to know, to support each other, to do business together, even to socialize? You are probably working with a group of people who have shared concerns: Staples customers who run small businesses, Gourmet readers who like to go on food holidays, Cisco router buyers who know a lot about networks, students who need jobs, alumni who are hiring. They are gathered outside your house. All you have to do is open the windows all around to let them talk with each other.
But do be careful. Don’t assume these people care about